With North Korea testing nuclear weapons and President Donald Trump mulling a response in kind, the world could soon see a resurgence in nuclear tests for the first time since the end of the Cold War. I break down the numbers.

Few Americans are mourning the passing of 2016, a possibly deadly and definitely tumultuous year. But I try to live by the philosophy of the Roman Stoic Epictetus — concern yourself only with the things you can control. And for me personally, 2016 was a pretty good year.

Not everything was perfect, of course, but I improved both my quality of living and my self over the past 12 months. Here's my assessment of my 2016.

On Tuesday, actress and author Carrie Fisher died, setting off a wave of lamentations not just for the beloved Fisher, but for the entire calendar year 2016.

Her death and those of seemingly countless other celebrities, athletes and world leaders have created an impression that the year 2016 has been particularly bad, an annus horribilis for the Anglo-American world.

In these days of high-octane political rhetoric and a party system defined more by "voting against the opposing party rather than for their own party," it's worth casting back into American history to another time when political tensions ran so high that each side believed the other would lead to the destruction of American ideals. Unlike now, things got so divisive that some states talked about seceding from the union and even stockpiled arms and mobilized militias to achieve their political goals through force.

I speak not of 1860, when all those things happened on the road to a brutal and bloody civil war, but rather of 1800 — when all those things happened but were averted just shy of bloodshed.

In their post-apocalyptic comedy novel “Good Omens,” authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman describe the nefarious handiwork of the demon Crowley, an agent of Hell on Earth with a particularly acute grasp of human nature:

I realize that I am somewhat biased, as someone whose idea of recreation is reading late-18th Century biography. So keep that in mind but try to set my funny sense of fun aside when I tell you that the new musical “Hamilton” is the most electric listening experience I’ve had in years. A bunch of guys in breeches and frock coats singing about arcane two-century-old political disputes? Well, I did like “1776,” but Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” is something else entirely. Read my review and hear some samples after the jump.

While researching historical elections this week for a future blog post, I stumbled across a fascinating piece of data: a table from an 1876 almanac summarizing the literacy rates in each of the 87 French départements at the time. The results varied wildly, from near-universal literacy in Paris and the country’s industrial northeast to majority illiteracy in the interior of La France profonde.

In 1870, Napoléon III abdicated as Emperor of the Second French Empire. Parliamentary deputies from around the country met to determine the next form of French government, and there was little reason to expect a republic. But France ended up with one anyway.

Six years ago, after graduating from college, I wanted to get into journalism, and I didn’t particularly care where. I fired off applications around the country — upstate New York, the Louisiana bayou, Washington D.C., California and everywhere in between.